City of Rapid City Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative

In 2021, Rapid City saw a record number of shootings and homicides.  In, 2021 Rapid City had 93 instances that were documented by the Rapid City Police Department (RCPD) of offenders being arrested for possessing stolen firearms and controlled substances. Rapid City has seen a drastic increase in violent firearm crimes, 2019 61; 2020:116; 2021:107 (RCPD Crime Stats).

From what is known about crime on the North Side, this neighborhood that makes up less than 20 percent of the general population. This small subsection of the City is experiencing more crime per capita than most of the large cities in America, especially the Native American residents.

What is needed to address the highest crime and victimization rates in Rapid City are place-based and community-driven violence intervention and prevention strategies. Moreover, neighborhoods like the North Side are well known to drastically underreport crime, making the measurement of violence and victimization disparities difficult to track and even harder to address.

The City and community violence intervention partners will utilize this grant opportunity to build the framework for long-term sustainability and change through the following goals: 

Further Expand and Enhance Youth Programming; Violence/Trauma Prevention and Intervention.
Create Equitable Community Development and Access to Services
Stabilize Youth, Family & Community
Respond and Heal Neighborhoods after Incidents of Violence.

The proposed community violence work is a collaborative effort through community input and researcher evaluation. The City will partner this application with the University of Cincinnati Center for Police Research and Policy, a research partner for the BJCI grant, and will apply through the NIJ solicitation. The City and partners have built the framework and programming to build capacity and sustain the CVI programs. The grant is the perfect solution to enhance and expand programming and organization capacity. 

There have been technical assistance from the Newark Community Street Team (NCST) through the Collective Healing Initiative and continued with the current White House CVI Initiative. CVI Partners recently went to Newark as part of the White House CVI to learn from NCST, employing credible messenger programs to address violence through a functional and preventive approach. The community team will liaise with prevention and intervention programs to provide boots-on-the-ground outreach. 
The City of Rapid City is applying for 1A (pg.9) and 1B (pg.12) priorities to build equity, capacity, and programming with the City’s Native American CVI partners – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Journey-On, and Wambli Ska. The City intends to sub-award over 60% of the funding to these entities to capacity and is in compliance with priority funding requirements